Riddley Walker

Russell Hoban (1925–2011) was an American novelist who lived in England
for much of his working life, producing a series of strikingly individual novels.

Riddley Walker is his genre-defying masterpiece, a free-wheeling
road-novel set in post-apocalyptic Kent, 2,500 years after a nuclear
catastrophe has plunged England back into a second Iron Age.
The survivors huddle in fenced settlements, packs of killer dogs
roam the countryside and the rudimentary government
communicates its policies through travelling puppet
shows that fuse Punch and Judy, the medieval myth
of St Eustace, elements of the New Testament and
garbled memories of the technology that brought
about the nuclear holocaust. This is a world where
the ruins of Canterbury Cathedral are misinterpreted
as the remains of a power station, and a postnuclear
mutant incarnation of the Archbishop might
just know the secret of nuclear fission.

Walker is my name and I am the same. Riddley Walker. Walking my riddels
where ever theyve took me and walking them now on this paper the same.

The book covers ten days in the life of Riddley Walker, already an
adult at the age of twelve, as he finds himself drawn into the
authorities’ desperate attempts to rediscover the secrets of technologies
of long ago, recover the knowledge of how to split the atom and relive
the longed-for glories of a lost past. Along the way Riddley finds
himself grappling with huge ideas: what it means to be
conscious, the struggle to become literate and
the burden of being a writer, the nature
of reality, and the tension between
humanity’s urge towards
self-expression and
self-destruction. As it
approaches its fortieth
anniversary, Riddley
Walker is as fresh and challenging
as ever – a book
that feels as though it was
written both in the distant
past and also far in the future,
that remains timely and timeless.

Russell Hoban always joked that death would be his best career move,
and would finally help establish him as more than a ‘cult author’. This
edition of his greatest work is the perfect place to start that reassessment.

Production Details

Limited to 1,000 numbered copies each signed and numbered by Quentin Blake

288 pages set in Poliphilus and Blado type, with hand-drawn titling

Printed in full colour on Woodstock Betulla paper, with 39 illustrations by Quentin Blake

Bound in full cloth, printed with a design by the artist

Featuring printed page edges

Spine blocked in foil printed with a design by the artist

Book size 14″ × 10″

Presented in a cloth-covered slipcase

Illustrations by Quentin Blake

This unique illustrated edition combines Hoban’s extraordinary text
with newly-commissioned large-scale illustrations by his long-term
collaborator Quentin Blake. This is the culmination of a partnership
that started over four decades ago with the anarchic How Tom Beat
Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen and lasted all the way to
Hoban’s final fable, Rosie’s Magic Horse, completed shortly before
his death in 2011.
But Blake has abandoned his characteristic life-affirming, humour-filled
action scenes, focusing instead on Riddley Walker’s threatening mood
and rain-drenched atmosphere. The result is a series of brooding
images: tiny figures crossing devastated landscapes, an eyeless and
noseless post-nuclear mutant, the impaled head of a boar, the sinister
figure of Mr Punch, the sprawled body of a torture victim … Coarse,
quill-drawn figures reminiscent of prehistoric graffiti are enhanced
by splodgy watercolour washes, to produce illustrations that seem to
be mouldering before your eyes.

Writing on Riddley Walker

This new limited edition includes ‘Acknowledgements’, ‘Afterword’, ‘Notes’ and
‘Glossary’ by Russell Hoban. Quentin Blake has contributed a new essay ‘Draw is a
intersting word’ and the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has
written a specially commissioned postscript ‘Myth and “knowledging” in Riddley Walker’.

Also included is a full-page colour image of The Legend of St Eustace, as reconstructed
by Professor E. W. Tristram from the fifteenth-century wall painting in the north choir
aisle of Canterbury Cathedral, and reproduced by permission of the Victoria and Albert
Museum, London.

"The post-apocalyptic theme is a common one in science fiction, but in Riddley Walker, it is approached in a unique way as it uses the language of the 44th. century rather than our own.
As a result, i..." [read more]

"The post-apocalyptic theme is a common one in science fiction, but in Riddley Walker, it is approached in a unique way as it uses the language of the 44th. century rather than our own.
As a result, it is not a fast book to read, but you soon get used to the new words and altered definitions of known words. Just let your eyes flow across the words and the meaning seems to become clear. Checking the glossary at the end of the book would have helped, but I only found this after I had finished.
To describe it as a nitty-gritty version of the dystopian future is a gross understatement. The rough edges grate on your consciousness, and as a result it is probably a far more realistic version of this possible future than that portrayed by the more dramatic authors of the genre.
The FS edition is superb with its dark moody textural cover (and page edge washes), heavy paper and large type (helps ion reading the strange dialect). The illustrations by Quentin Blake perfectly fit the dialogue, and are at exactly the right place in the text.
A book that I will remember for a long time, and this edition is highly recommended.
" [hide full review]